Prepayment meter question

gilligansyle

I have a prepayment meter with Scottish Power as it allows me to budget better, also they wanted £300 deposit to put a quarterly meter in. Recently they changed my meter to one that takes a plastic key rather than tokens and I found that instead of my normal £5 - £7 a week, I was using £20 +. I queried this and received a letter with the following response.

"outstanding balance of £389.24 was due to the prepayment meter in your property and the settings on the meter not being adjusted to the current electricity prices from 1999 to 2008 therefore leaving your meter to be undercollecting. Since your key meter was installed you have been paying this back at £9.73 per week...."

Question 1

Can they do this

Question 2

what makes them think that someone on a key meter to help them budget can suddenly afford £10 a week extra?

Can I report them to Ofgen as I think this is unfair practise?

oops thats 3 questions.

anniecave

they certainly have the right to increase your payments if they find you have been underpaying. This unfortunately is often the problem with pre-payment meters, as they don't get recalculated often enough when prices are rising. With a normal meter they issue bills each month and tariffs are updated immediately and a customer can check their readings.

I would complain to energywatch and ask them to spread the arrears over a longer period of time. If you are paying back almost £10 per week extra just for the arrears, this will be repaid in about 7 months. They should be able to spread it over a longer period of time.

So £10 of the extra is due to the arrears. The rest will be due to the fact that generally prices have gone up I'm afraid. You will have to put up with that!

BexTech

A common problem with the horrid pre-payment meters I'm afraid, often hear of people where they have underpaid.

I hate the things, don't like the hassle of them and don't like the dearer costs involved with them, OK the savings now are a lot less than it used to be, but up until recently we'd have been well over £400 worse off a year with a pre-payment meter compared to online direct debit credit meter, one year the difference was over £530. To us that is an awful lot of money to be paying extra for the inconvenience of pre-payment and we aren't high users.

Joyful

Unfortunately there are still some companies charging for the tariff not being correct therefore leaving you with a balance. I feel though that they should have checked how much you could afford to repay. Contact them and negotiate a lower weekly repayment. The new key meters will not allow this to happen. As you will now be paying the correct price for your electricity you will notice an increase for this alone.

Harley_Quin

Hi, sorry if this post gets long winded but here goes...

You are liable for the debt, but IF your supplier is part of the Energy Retailers Association and IF they include PP in their back billing code of practice then they SHOULD only bill you for the past 12 months debt UNLESS They issued you a demand IN WRITING - Which they don't seem to have done - Energywatch and OfGem take a dim view of this type of behaviour as your supplier has a responsibility to stop you building up a debt and under Licence condition 28.2 they are obliged to reset the meter within a "reasonable" period, I don't think that should be over years, so you should complain first to the company , then to Ofgem and Energywatch (whilst it still exists)

I would also complain to them about being charged £300 to change to a credit meter, suppliers are supposed to not put obsticles in the way of customers getting the best deal, and a £300 deposit seems steep

Next, although you are liable for the debt due to your token meter not being recalibrated the company should not set the debt repayment level without speaking to you, another supplier licence condition says that they should make sure that the debt level is affordable, how can they do that without speaking to you? if if they will not reduce it and you cannot afford the repayments go to the CAB or other debt advice centre and get them to work out what you can afford; your supplier MUST take this into account

Finally, I would urge you to change to a credit meter, the discounts you can get for paying by direct debit are really worth having

Ducks_Bum

I appreciate why budgeting on a prepayment might be easier but had you ever considered using a different budget plan to pay for your gas and electric.

You pay much more on a PP meter than if you paid on a payment plan in your post office and certainly a lot more than if you paid Direct Debit. Both of these are ways of budgeting for your gas and electric and although PP meters do make it slightly easier to budget as you know exactly how much you have spent etc, if you put say one hour aside every month to manage your account by paying on a credit meter I think you'd be surprise how easy it is to manage a budget for gas and electric.

You could use the hour to ring up your company for a read, check whether you're in a credit or debit and then act according.

You're probably paying 30 quid extra per month for the pp meter, is it really worth paying that much just to make it easier to budget your account when there other far cheaper methods available?

Let me know your thoughts

Harley_Quin

Hi, sorry if this post gets long winded but here goes...

You are liable for the debt, but IF your supplier is part of the Energy Retailers Association and IF they include PP in their back billing code of practice then they SHOULD only bill you for the past 12 months debt UNLESS They issued you a demand IN WRITING - Which they don't seem to have done - Energywatch and OfGem take a dim view of this type of behaviour as your supplier has a responsibility to stop you building up a debt and under Licence condition 28.2 they are obliged to reset the meter within a "reasonable" period, I don't think that should be over years, so you should complain first to the company , then to Ofgem and Energywatch (whilst it still exists)

I would also complain to them about being charged £300 to change to a credit meter, suppliers are supposed to not put obsticles in the way of customers getting the best deal, and a £300 deposit seems steep

Next, although you are liable for the debt due to your token meter not being recalibrated the company should not set the debt repayment level without speaking to you, another supplier licence condition says that they should make sure that the debt level is affordable, how can they do that without speaking to you? if if they will not reduce it and you cannot afford the repayments go to the CAB or other debt advice centre and get them to work out what you can afford; your supplier MUST take this into account

Finally, I would urge you to change to a credit meter, the discounts you can get for paying by direct debit are really worth having

Harley_Quin

Joyful wrote: »

Unfortunately there are still some companies charging for the tariff not being correct therefore leaving you with a balance. I feel though that they should have checked how much you could afford to repay. Contact them and negotiate a lower weekly repayment. The new key meters will not allow this to happen. As you will now be paying the correct price for your electricity you will notice an increase for this alone.

Sorry Joyful but sometimes the keys do not pick up the correct prices when they go up, this can still happen with keys, although as you should pick up the current prices every time you vend that should reduce it but keys can still fail to pick up messages